What Sam Altman’s surprise sacking means for the AI race
HOW QUICKLY the mighty fall. Ever since the release of ChatGPT a year ago, Sam Altman has been the human face of the generative artificial-intelligence revolution. As recently as November 16th the co-founder and boss of OpenAI was touting the virtues of AI to executives and world leaders at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit in San Francisco. The very next day he was out on his ear. A blog post on OpenAI’s website said the board “no longer has confidence” in Mr Altman’s leadership because “he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board”. Another shock came hours later. Greg Brockman, chairman of the firm’s board and another co-founder, resigned in response to Mr Altman’s sacking.
The defenestration was all the more surprising because Mr Altman seemed at the peak of his powers. He had recently completed a world tour where everyone from Narendra Modi to Emmanuel Macron jockeyed to meet him. On November 6th he had launched a suite of new AI tools at OpenAI’s developer day, drawing comparisons with Steve Jobs—a parallel that now seems ironic, considering that in 1985 Jobs too was booted out of the company he had founded. One startup boss says Mr Altman’s and Mr Brockman’s departures are as serious as if Larry Page and Sergey Brin had been kicked out of Google during its early years.
OpenAI’s employees and investors were blindsided by the move. Mr Brockman later tweeted that he and Mr Altman had not been aware of what was happening until minutes before the ousting. According to Axios, a news website, Microsoft, which has a 49% stake in the firm, was also in the dark until the last minute. Microsoft’s stock fell by 2% on the news, probably because the firm’s AI ambitions, including a hotly anticipated “copilot” for its Office suite, hinge on access to OpenAI’s technology.
2023-11-18 06:54:31
Post from www.economist.com
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